When animal researchers are attacked, as they were recently in Santa Cruz, it’s often by extremists who say living creatures are being needlessly tortured just so people can have safe drugs, cosmetics and other household goods.

In fact, federal agencies – including the Food and Drug Administration and Consumer Product Safety Commission – encourage companies to find ways to assess their products without experimenting on rats, monkeys and other animals.

Yet millions of animals still are used for testing in this country each year. That’s partly because they have proved vital for product research. But it’s also because few practical alternatives to gauge the safety and usefulness of products have been found.

That is beginning to change, through concerted efforts by scientists and regulators to find new test methods. Although it may take several decades, “I think we’ll be able to do this in most situations without animals,” said William Stokes, executive director of Interagency Coordinating Committee on the Validation of Alternative Methods, a group of 15 federal agencies that analyze non-animal testing methods.

Virtual reality

Options being explored by biomedical and other businesses include everything from virtual-reality computer programs to biochips packed with enzymes to synthetic skin.

At Numerate in San Bruno, scientists have developed a computer program to assess experimental drugs using databases to analyze how various compounds interact with the human body.

The company already has used the program to identify several possible diabetes treatments, without having to give the treatments to animals, according to Numerate’s chief executive, Guido Lanza. However, until the FDA gives its formal approval to the program, whatever medicine ultimately is developed still would be tested on animals.

“This is the way drugs will be designed in the future,” Lanza said of the new method. Given the comparatively high cost and controversy associated with animal testing, “the old way is not viable.”

Entelos of Foster City uses similar computer modeling to create virtual patients, which can be simulated to have various diseases and analyzed to see how they might respond to different medications.

Still another method is being pursued by Solidus Biosciences. It uses a biochip pockmarked with human enzymes and cells that is designed to mimic the body’s likely reaction to a wide range of experimental drugs.

“We are working with the pharmaceutical and cosmetic industries to evaluate these chips,” said Douglas Clark, a University of California-Berkeley chemical engineering professor, who co-founded the company. “Hopefully, they will be on the market soon.”

If so, Clark’s biochip will be joined by many similar products, according to a report in June by PricewaterhouseCoopers. It concluded that by 2020, virtual patients and other such methods “will be widely employed in pharmaceutical research, reducing the need to experiment on living creatures.”

That would be a big change. For more than a century, animals have been routinely relied upon to test the safety and effectiveness of drugs, cosmetics, pesticides, household cleaning agents and other products.

U.S. officials don’t track how many animals are used in research each year. One government report in the 1980s put the figure at about 20 million. Some experts believe the use of animals has decreased since then. But others estimate the number undergoing studies now totals 30 million, 50 million or even more, reflecting the biomedical industry’s growth over the past two decades.

Santa Cruz attack

The issue of how many animals are used and the kinds of experiments they undergo is touchy, especially in light of the Aug. 2 firebombing of a Santa Cruz researcher’s home and the harassment of other local animal researchers. Executives at the Bay Area’s two biggest biotech firms – Genentech of South San Francisco and Gilead Sciences of Foster City – declined to discuss the subject.

Nonetheless, groups promoting animal research say it has led to numerous medical breakthroughs, including the development of local anesthetics, blood transfusions, kidney dialysis, heart transplants and drugs to battle AIDS.

“Virtually every major medical advance in the past century has involve animal models, at least in part,” said Frankie Trull, president of the Foundation for Biomedical Research in Washington.

The non-profit group’s Web site insists “the majority of animals used in biomedical research do not experience significant pain or distress.”

But others claim many animals have been blinded, burned, starved, poisoned and killed in product tests. Keeping alive large numbers of rats, primates or other creatures over long periods also can be costly. Drugs that function well in non-human species don’t always prove effective or safe when given to people.

Some alternatives to animal tests already are in use.

It used to be common for corrosive chemicals to be administered to animals to see if the chemicals would burn their skin. Now, synthetic skin can be used for such tests. Many cosmetic companies, which have been denounced in the past for animal experiments, have found other ways to test their products.

New alternatives

More alternatives could be in the offing soon.

Last year, the National Research Council recommended using “high-throughput assays” – automated experiments that can rapidly examine the potential toxicity of thousands of chemicals – to reduce the dependence on animals for tests. The idea was endorsed in February by the National Institutes of Health and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Those developments have cheered officials at the Humane Society of the United States, which favors limiting animal research but has denounced the recent attacks on researchers.

“We’re in the middle of a massive revolution in the methods used for toxicity testing,” said Martin Stephens, the organization’s vice president for animal-research issues. “That is very exciting.”

The trend also encourages Alan Goldberg, director of the Johns Hopkins University Center for Alternatives to Animal Testing.

Considering how essential animal tests are for research today, it’s hard to imagine a time when they might be eliminated, Goldberg said. Nonetheless, he added, “the progress has been unbelievable – positively unbelievable.”